Happy 15 Years

Today, Rich and I celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary--well, if by celebrate, you mean Rich woke up by 5 am to get showered and read scriptures before getting kids up for early morning seminary and Khristine spent all morning dealing with a fussy, teething baby! Actually, we did get to sneak out for an hour to have lunch alone at The Olive Garden. We thought it was funny that we had to take the 15 passenger van for our "alone" date, since Rich's car was in the shop!


We spent our lunch talking about some of the funny things we remember from our early days of marriage. I remembered that we were late getting to our open house in Camarillo. We were driving from Monterey, and we mistakenly took Highway 1, which took forever. When we finally got to the 101, it was bumper to bumper traffic. It was almost time for the open house to begin, so Rich tried to speed things up by racing off every off-ramp, speeding through the intersection, and racing back on the on-ramp, skipping as much heavy traffic as possible. In this way, I learned about the Pettingill driving habits! Rich remembered the morning sickness that I had within about a month of marriage. His black curly hair, which I found so attractive when we were dating, actually made me want to throw up, along with his breath! He also remembered our first fight, which was over buying a laser printer for our house because he was having trouble getting to school early enough to print in the computer lab. Sadly, I held that $800 debt over his head long after it was paid off! I remembered our first Christmas tree, which was actually more like a branch, that we got for free. I tried to make inexpensive decorations, which were very large, homemade raffia bows that really accentuated how small the tree was. We remembered together how our car broke down somewhere in Nevada on our way back from Christmas break. This was in the days before cell phones. Somehow, we found out that Lewis and Jeri were miraculously stopped in the same town, and they helped us get the car fixed so we could continue on our way the next day. We also both remembered eating ham and cheese sandwiches for lunch together in the Tanner Building at BYU, in the quiet school days before we had the twins. Not quite 9 months after we were married we became a family of four (the twins came almost 3 weeks early). It has never slowed down one bit since!!!


I am posting a bunch of pictures here of our family. I guess you can't have 8 children in 15 years without mostly focusing on the children. However, I think it says something about our marriage that we have spent the last almost 7 months with Rich home full-time without killing each other! Actually, to tell you the truth, it has been a lot of fun spending so much time together. I will really miss him during the day, and so will the kids, when he heads back off to work one of these days. I only have pictures from 2003 and later on the computer, so that is what you get. It is also representative of what life has been like that I could only find two pictures of just the two of us from the last five years. Every other picture has one of us holding a baby! But you know what? We wouldn't change a thing!!

August Activities

There are all kinds of things from August to tell about already. First of all, our school district has started school. Can you believe it?! Katie began high school on Monday, Beth began 1st grade, and Jacob and Katie began seminary. Wow! Now we are really the parents of youth, driving to seminary at 6:20 am. It's not much for Rich, since he was raised on the 9 pm to 5 am sleep schedule. I haven't had to do it yet, since he is handling the driving for now. I don't have pictures from the first day of school because I was not here for it. My sister and I got to go see her daughter in Virginia over the weekend and didn't get home until Monday afternoon. However, I do have pictures of all the fun we had on that trip. We went to the beach in Hampton, VA one day. We went to Washington D.C. another day. Then we went to church with Whitney and watched the Men's 4x100 Olympic Relay Swim Team break the World Record the last day. It was great fun. Anna was a perfect traveler. She climbed all over the important monuments of our nation. We even got to see them at night. What a great trip! Other than the trip to the capitol, the most exciting thing that happened was the shooting that took place in Whitney's complex on the second night of our stay. We all went outside with the neighbors once the police showed up to see what happened. It turned out that a 22 yr. old man was killed in an "altercation." I guess it is a good spot to live for a homeschooled girl who wants to become an ER nurse (as long as she can avoid the shooting!) While we were off having fun, Rich stayed home and held down the fort. Of note, Katie thought the first day of school was pretty boring, but she seems to like it now, especially french (mais oui!!) Beth loved it. Jacob and Katie both like seminary, so far.
So the funny story for the week happened yesterday. I was heading off to the pool with some children for an afternoon swim. Rich needed t0 go to the grocery store. He was concerned because I was taking Anna and Jeffrey to the pool by myself. He assumed he had to go with me to help because I would have two little ones by myself. I laughed and laughed. This is the dad who has spent many, many weeks of summer in foreign countries and the rest of the time in the Bay Area or L.A. working, while I took our family, made up of little children, to swimming lessons and to swim by myself. I love it that he thinks we are that dependent on him now! Please don't give away my secret or he may decide to go work in the Bay Area again!

TREK

Jacob and Katie turned 14 just in time to participate in our Stake TREK on July 24-26. The activity involved hiking 22 miles in 2 and 1/2 days, with handcarts. They split up into families with Stake couples called to be the Ma and Pa and assigned 8-10 youth as their family members. They each had to wear somewhat authentic pioneer dress. Katie even made bloomers to go under her ankle-length skirt.

There were Trek cooks who prepared all the meals, so they were not given a live chicken to cook for dinner, as we have heard done in other stakes. However, in Katie's family, shown in the picture, the dad and one of the older brothers "died," meaning they each got injuries that prevented them from helping the family anymore. That meant the hard work of pushing the handcart had to be done by the girls more than in other companies. Katie tells us she spent most of the time up front at the yoke.
In Jacob's family, in the next picture, there were two big 17-year old boys who carried the heaviest burden, so the younger boys and the girls got to take turns and rest. Jacob was ready to do Trek again, but Katie said she was glad she went but would never want to do it again!

Here are some "after"pictures. Our Bishop and his wife, Denise, went as a Ma and Pa. Denise said the dirt was unimagineable. Even Katie's bloomers came home dirt-colored. Denise made her real family members that attended change in the garage before coming inside to shower. She said she couldn't stand all that dirt in her house. We already have plenty of dirt in our house all the time, so we let Jacob and Katie come inside, but we drew the line at laying on our bed!!

You can tell that Anna, in Katie's arms, isn't sure what to think. By the way, Denise's suggestion for future Trek participants is to bring your own package of baby wipes to wash hands and clean the dirt off legs at the end of the day.

In the last few pictures, you get a feel for what the trek was like. In the first one, Katie is pulling the handcart at the yoke in the front on the right hand side. In the second, you see the group of companies traveling along, one after another. Katie "trekked" for Lewis' great-grandmother, Emma Zundel who crossed the plains as a girl with her family. Jacob "trekked" for Elihu Pettingill, who crossed the plains sometime after he was baptized at age 16. Elihu and Emma later married and had 9 children together, including Jefferson Bartlett Pettingill, who was Lewis' grandfather. Looking back, Jacob and Katie both now say it was the hardest thing they have done but that they were glad they went.

Camping, camping and more camping

I had visions of a relaxing, carefree summer. While it has been pretty carefree, it has not been relaxing. There is always something going on to keep us hopping. This is why I am just now posting pictures from our Bodega Bay camping trip from the 4th of July week.

We have become real campers now. Every other year, we have gone (with Rich going reluctantly many years) with my sister on their annual campout with friends. This year, we just couldn't find a week that would work for all of us, so we began our own annual friends campout. I feel like we are real campers now because 1)Rich wanted to go 2)we went without the Keables and 3)we have all the gear necessary for a comfortable and fun week of camping. You might wonder, what changed Rich's mind about camping? It certainly isn't that our children are growing up and it's getting easier, because the older ones are growing up but little ones keep coming along! However, Rich's attitude about camping changed a few years ago when we priced renting a house in Santa Cruz. He became converted when he realized that camping is cheap!

So here is what we did and some pictures to go along with it:

We camped along the Sonoma Coast, which is chilly. However, there are amazing beaches for exploring and also, you are not far from the Russian River (about 45 minutes) for lots of fun in the sun. We spent several days combing the beaches just up the coast from our campsite. Most of the beaches there are made up of small, polished rocks, which are hard on the feet but so much fun for exploring. One day, we went to the closest beach, which is sandy, where there were lots of surfers and the kids could play in the water. Two days, we went to the Russian River, including on the 4th of July. Everyone had fun getting in the water on those days. We saw the fireworks in Petaluma on the 4th, which was a fun show. We also spent one evening at a nearby beach called Shell Beach, where we got to explore tide pools and find lots of great shells.
Our campsite was actually located on a sand dune. The kids had a ball rolling down the sandy slope and playing everything from football to tag games on the sand. They did a lot less bike-riding than usual because the sand dune was so entertaining. It is much less dirty to camp in sand, especially for the crawling baby. However, you bring a lot of sand home in the laundry and camping equipment. I am not sure we will ever get all of the sand out of the laundry room!




















Rich came to a grand conclusion this year. He had always thought it would be easier to camp without so many little ones along. And it is. Little children take a lot of care while camping with changing diapers, trip to the bathrooms, changing wet clothes when you don't make it to the bathroom soon enough, changing Mom or Dad's wet clothes after helping little children shower, etc, etc, etc. However, Rich's perspective on all this changed after a comment made by Jeffrey on Saturday morning, as we were packing up to go home. He asked why we were packing things up. We told him it was time to go home. He replied, emphatically, "I don't want to go home! I want to stay here forever!" The rest of us had gotten pretty sick of the fog, the sand, the damp towels, and the skunks (our campsite friends that faithfully came every night at 10 pm with the racoon.) Rich decided that, while the little ones take a lot of work, it is fun they can't get anywhere else. They get to be free to explore and play and ride bikes and throw rocks and be outside and get dirty as much as they want, all things they don't get to do at home.

Here is one other cute conversation Rich had with Jeffrey as we were just waking up one morning:

Jeffrey: Dad. Dad?
Rich: Yes, Jeffrey?
Jeffrey: Dad, is it morning time?
Rich: Yep.
Jeffrey: Did someone turn the lights on?
Rich: Well, the sun is coming up and making the tent light.
Jeffrey: So we can get up now?
Rich: You can get up or you can keep sleeping.
Jeffrey: I think I want to keep sleeping.
Rich: Okay!
Jeffrey: Dad?
Rich: Yes, Jeffrey?
Jeffrey: Those snores we had at the fire before bed last night sure were good!